The practice of monitoring heartbeats maintained by elements of a system to infer faults is historically performed by a dedicated monitoring device that monitors each other devices' heartbeat to determine if each device is healthy. One or more of the monitored devices can itself monitor the monitoring device to ensure its health. However, such centralized monitoring can result in ambiguity as to which core is failing, and such techniques can require a heartbeat history of each monitored element be maintained over many heartbeat cycles.